


running from your shadow

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 13:57:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6756931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A disastrous mission leaves the Bus down two scientists, but that's okay - Coulson's already got replacements in mind. Unfortunately for Grant, one of those replacements just happens to be his ex-wife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	running from your shadow

**Author's Note:**

> Approximately a million years ago, an anonymous prompter on tumblr said: "What do you think of like the reverse of your divorced au? Like Grant's always been on the team and Coulson has him call in his genius scientist ex wife to help out on a job somewhere.."
> 
> This isn't the fic I wanted to write in response, but it's...let's call it a prequel to that fic. Thanks for reading and, as always, please be gentle if you review!

“All right,” Coulson says once the team (with two notable exceptions) is gathered in the briefing room. “I’ve got good news and bad news. First of all, Carmichael’s going to be fine.”

Skye raises her hand. “Is that the good news or the bad news?”

Grant gives her a chiding frown, but honestly, he doesn’t disagree. Carmichael is a prick, and he’s made this whole team thing even worse than Grant expected it to be. If the guy hadn’t tripped and fallen down that ravine on his own…well, it’s not like Grant would _actually_ have pushed him, but he definitely would’ve thought about it.

A lot.

“The good news,” Coulson clarifies with a stern frown. The lack of actual scolding says a lot, though.

“And the bad news?” May asks.

“It’ll be six weeks before he’s fit for active duty.”

Skye leans against the holocom. “Still not hearing the bad news, AC.”

“Skye,” Grant says, because Coulson’s giving him that _you’re her SO, it’s your job to better her as a person_ look. “Enough.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “It’s not nice. But seriously, how is that bad news?”

“Because we’re down a scientist,” May says.

“Actually, we’re down _two_ scientists,” Coulson corrects, and shrugs when the three of them look at him. “Apparently this op was the last straw for Brunswick. She’s officially resigned from the team.”

Grant’s not surprised. Brunswick’s been increasingly jumpy since the op in Lisbon; it’s clear she doesn’t have what it takes to make it in the field.

Of course, it does present a pretty significant problem.

“Are we being stood down?” he asks. A response team without scientists isn’t a response team, it’s a strike team. And since Skye’s barely half-trained and May is just the pilot, this team doesn’t really qualify as that, either.

“What?” Skye demands. “They can’t do that! Can they?”

“They can,” May confirms.

Coulson hurries on before Skye can respond to that. “Luckily, they haven’t. We have three days to find replacements for Brunswick and Carmichael.”

Grant straightens. He really hopes this isn’t going where he thinks it is.

“Three days?” Skye asks. “Where are we supposed to find two scientists in three days? It’s not like they grow on _trees_.” She hesitates, then gives Coulson a suspicious look. “Or do they? Does SHIELD grow geniuses on trees, AC? Be honest.”

“No, Skye,” he says patiently. “SHIELD does not grow scientists, on trees or otherwise. I do, however, have a few candidates in mind already.”

He taps at the holocom, and—

Fuck.

Grant was afraid of that.

“Leopold—Leopold? Really? _Nice_ —Fitz and…huh. Jemma Ward,” Skye reads off the screen. She gives Grant a sideways look. “Sister? Cousin?”

He grimaces. “Ex-wife.” As Skye gapes, he turns his attention to Coulson. “Sir, I don’t think—”

“I’m sure it’ll be awkward, Ward,” Coulson interrupts, “but I want the best, and FitzSimmons is definitely the best.”

“They are,” Grant says, subtly stressing the plural. That _FitzSimmons_ shit has never stopped irritating him. “But that doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for a field team. Fitz is a coward; you’ll have to drag him from his lab kicking and screaming.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Coulson muses. “I’m a persuasive kind of guy.” He gives Grant a skeptical eyebrow. “And I don’t think Fitz’s relative courage is why you’re hesitating. How about you try out your _real_ objection?”

Of course he’s gonna make Grant say it.

“Jemma and I didn’t part on great terms, sir,” he says, hiding his anger behind a painfully awkward mask. “She and Fitz might not be willing to work with me.”

Coulson nods thoughtfully. “It’s a risk. But, again, I’m a persuasive guy.”

Grant’s getting a sinking feeling that he’s not gonna be able to stop this—and the half sympathetic, half irritated _give it up_ look May’s giving him definitely supports that—but he has to. He can’t let this happen. Fitz on the team would be an annoyance, but _Jemma_?

No. Just…no.

He reaches desperately for another objection, one that might actually _work_ , and is relieved to actually hit on one almost immediately.

“But even if you can convince them,” he says, “they aren’t field rated. It’ll take longer than three days to get them assessed—and that’s not even addressing the fact that if they aren’t trained up a bit beforehand, there’s no way they can _pass_ an assessment.”

“Ah.” Coulson smiles that smile that means he’s about to pull the rug out from under someone. “You’re a bit behind on the times, Agent Ward.” He takes a second to bring up a file on the holocom, and the bottom drops right out of Grant’s stomach. “They put in a request for field work nearly six months ago. Simmons passed her assessment—barely, but she passed it—and while Fitz didn’t, I’ve already gotten Director Fury’s approval to bring him on anyway.”

Grant…honestly doesn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, Ward,” Coulson continues (though he doesn’t particularly sound it), “but this is a done deal. We’re on our way to the Sandbox to pick them up; unless they’re completely opposed to the idea, which I don’t anticipate, they’ll be assigned to our team by the end of the day.”

Skye makes a worried little noise, alerting Grant to the fact that his mask has cracked a little. He breathes in slowly, shoving all of his messy and unimportant emotions behind a wall, and deliberately blanks his face.

“Understood,” he says finally—and Coulson actually does look sympathetic at his subdued tone. Skye’s been inching her way closer for the past few minutes and is now at standing at his elbow, visibly primed to offer comfort. Even May—herself divorced—looks like she might be thinking about saying something.

Grant’s gotta get out of here.

“If there’s nothing else, sir?” he asks.

Coulson pauses, and then—thankfully—shakes his head. “Nope. That’s it.”

Thank fuck.

He leaves the briefing room without another word. It’s a good thing Carmichael’s still in recovery at the Dome, because Grant’s got a desperate need to hit something, and if that prick crossed his path right now, he doesn’t think he’d be able to resist making it him.

As it is, the punching bag’ll have to do. He just hopes the team has the sense to leave him alone for a few hours.

 

 

 

Coulson and May do. Skye doesn’t.

Forty minutes into Grant’s session with the punching bag, she creeps her way down the stairs. At first, she goes into the lab, and he hopes—vaguely, with the fraction of his attention that can’t _not_ be focused on someone wandering around behind him—she’s gonna leave him be.

But it’s only another ten minutes before he hears her leave the lab, and then her worried gaze is itching at his back. She’s standing too close to get away with ignoring.

“What.”

“Are things with your ex really so bad?” she asks, a little tentatively. “Maybe it’ll go better than you think.”

Not likely.

But that’s a concern, actually. This is almost definitely gonna be a disaster, which means he needs to think about damage control. He’s put a lot of work into Skye, winning her over and gaining her trust—and beyond that, he’s actually grown kind of fond of her.

Jemma…Jemma’s above deliberately turning his own team against him as a form of petty revenge. He doesn’t think she’s even capable of it. Fitz, on the other hand…

Grant needs to get Skye on his side, so to speak, of the divorce before Fitz shows up to spill his side of it. And since Jemma and Fitz are joining the team _today_ …this is his only real chance. Which means that as much as he’d like to tell her to just fuck off so he can get his head on straight…

He stops his assault on the bag and steadies it, trying to ground himself in the sensation of the familiar fabric against his palms. He needs to be calm, level-headed—needs to keep his cover, shade this with the right tones.

But goddamn is it hard.

“Jemma and I,” he starts, and then stops himself when his voice comes out rougher than he means it to. He takes a deep breath and tries again. “We…didn’t end things well.”

“Yeah,” Skye says. He can feel her curious eyes burning into his back, but her tone, at least, is sympathetic. “Kinda picked up on that.”

He closes his eyes. The slight scuff of her shoes against the floor tells him she’s rocking back on her heels, the way she does when she’s uncomfortable and trying to build herself up to something. If he doesn’t share quickly, she’ll probably start offering reassurance.

“It was my fault.” He has to swallow around the tightness in his throat. For once, all of his emotion is completely real. “I didn’t—I was pretty horrible to her.”

It still pisses him off, two years on. He didn’t want to ruin his marriage; he loved Jemma and fully intended on keeping her forever.

But HYDRA’s orders were clear: end his marriage, or they’d do it for him.

So he broke his wife into pieces, slowly and deliberately, until things were bad enough that her sense of self-preservation won out over her desire to make things work. And considering just how little self-preservation Jemma actually _has_?

Things were really fucking bad.

He’s gone out of his way not to see her since the divorce. The memory of her by the end, small and hesitant and quiet, fractured by the emotional wounds he inflicted, still itches at him when he lets it. And when it does, he tells himself she’s probably back to her old self by now. It’s been two years; she’s probably over it.

Grant doesn’t scare easy, but the fear that he’s wrong—that he did irreparable damage—is almost paralyzing. As long as he keeps his distance from Jemma, he doesn’t have to know for sure.

Unfortunately, that plan just got screwed. Trust Carmichael to manage to ruin even being freed of him.

“Oh. Um,” Skye flounders a little, and he hates this more than ever, because he’d like nothing better than to tell her to fuck off. She’s gonna try to comfort him, because that’s just who Skye _is_ , and he doesn’t want any part of it. Not today. “It can’t have been _that_ bad, right? I mean, she’s still using your name, so…”

Grant spent months using the FitzSimmons thing as a weapon against Jemma; by the end, she’d cringe just to hear it. He’d like to believe that’s not why she hasn’t gone back to using her maiden name—that, two years on, she wouldn’t flinch at being addressed as Simmons—but there’s no way of knowing.

“That could mean a lot of things,” he says and, deciding his cover would hate this conversation just as much as he does, returns his attention to the punching bag. He’s said what he can; further detail would only hurt his cause.

Skye obviously takes it as the hint it is, because she doesn’t stick around much longer.

He spends hours bruising his knuckles on the bag, trying not to think about Jemma.

He doesn’t think of all the nights Jemma spent crying herself to sleep—of all the nights he made it _worse_ , both deliberately and not. There were nights that he _couldn’t_ ignore her misery, nights when he didn’t have the self-control to listen to her sobbing without offering comfort, and he knows those nights hurt her just as badly as the nights when he was a complete dick to her. When he hugged her and apologized and kissed away her tears, he gave her hope—hope that he always ripped away the very next morning.

But he’s not thinking about that. Just like he’s not thinking about how tentative she got, how she went from scolding him for being careless when injured to frowning over his wounds to hanging nervously back in the doorway, lacking the confidence to offer her help in replacing bandages.

He’s sure as hell not thinking about the way he crushed her spirit or the fact that she couldn’t even ask him for a divorce in person.

No. All he’s thinking about is the pain in his knuckles and the peaceful silence of the cargo bay.

He doesn’t get bothered again.


End file.
